Bush Goes to Vietnam

President Bush connected the Iraq War to the Vietnam War last week in a way that has forced many people from that generation to scratch their heads and many historians to throw objects at their laptops. Really at stake here is how we use history to justify the actions of the present. Politicians do this all of the time. It’s not just Bush, and it’s not just now, but his comments were really interesting in any case. So what did he say? Bush stated that there was still debate about the reasons we entered Vietnam and the reasons we left. This is not actually the case. The documented reasons are very clear. All someone has to do is remember the 1954 Geneva Conference, the Gulf of Tonkin incident and resolution and the Pentagon Papers, what they meant, and how the government tried to prevent the public from knowing about them. Bush’s argument is that withdrawal is and was equal to failure. Because we withdrew from Vietnam, we lost. If we withdraw from Iraq, we lose. Before considering the merit of that claim, consider how many Vietnamese died then and how many Iraqis have died now. Consider the cost of the Iraq War. First, the argument against withdrawal concedes the argument against entering. No one is trying to defend that decision now, even Bush. Weapons of mass destruction are selectively forgotten. Second, withdrawal raises all kinds of worse scenarios: Iran controlling Iraq, more terrorist attacks against the US, weakness and dishonor in the face of the Muslim world, strategic loss of military bases in the Middle East, and more. All of these arguments, however, use the ‘trap’ argument. We can’t leave because the alternative is worse. That sounds like we’re trapped by our choices. Now, let’s get back to Vietnam for a bit. That war affected a whole generation. I was born right near the end, but my father served in the middle of it. So did many people I met later in life. Very few people speak of that war with pride in their country now. But let’s not confuse the issue. The soldiers did what they were ordered to do, even those in My Lai. Decisions during the Cold War and during the ‘War on Terror’ are made at the top.

So what does Bush mean now? The reality is that, as a ‘lame duck’ president, Bush is stuck with hard choices. On one hand, he doesn’t want to weaken his foreign policy at the end of his term. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to weaken the Republican position in the 2008 election for whoever their pick is. He knows Iran is watching, waiting for any opportunity. He knows the potential for another terrorist attack in the US is unfortunately a possibility. He does not want to leave Iraq, for all of the reasons stated above, but like Vietnam, an occupation coupled with a war does not succeed (some suggest it can never succeed) without internal change and support. Can the Sunni, Shiite and Kurd people work together to create a democratic society with stable political, economic and legal institutions protected and reinforced by law? No ‘surge’ of military force can guarantee that. Ultimately, victory or defeat is up to them, not us. It was the same in Vietnam. It was a hard lesson to learn, but by 1968, it was fairly clear that the US had lost support for the war both inside South Vietnam (the people we were supposed to be helping) and inside the US with more and more protests. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came out against the war. Thousands of intellectuals and hundreds of thousands of youth also protested. It became the decisive issue of the 1968 election campaign. What will happen now? Will the US retreat to its bases in the south and west of the Iraqi desert, leaving the chaos to the Iraqis (and Iranians) themselves? Will we try to maintain police order, rebuild their infrastructure, run their government through proxies, and fund our military occupation indefinitely? The answers lay in how we understand our own past and in this case, the Vietnam War.